Do you know there are a wide variety of Petri dishes?

Do you know the wide variety of Petri dishes available to you? Everyone knows the 90 or 100-mm diameter and 15-mm thickness box used routinely in all microbiology laboratories. (It is also fascinating to note that this small disposable plastic tray, invented by Julius Richard Petri, a German microbiologist of the early 20th century, remains today the indispensable tool of microbiology. Even for the most highly automated laboratories, this little dish remains essential!).

At Simport, since we never do things like others, we do not offer, the most popular dish described above. We offer so much more!

Let’s start with variations on the same theme, the 100 mm diameter box. We offer this size but with 20 and 25-mm thicknesses. The additional height allows putting more growing medium. It is practical for growing tedious organisms that would exhaust all the food of an ordinary agar, such as yeasts and fungus.

On the other hand, we may sometimes need only a little cultivation media and, for cost savings, use a box of 60 x 15 mm. The same principle is seen in the smaller 35 x 10 mm boxes.

For other microbiological applications, such as tests for liquids, aerosols, mycobacteria, or even for immunodiffusion methods (which incidentally have nothing to do with microbiology), small boxes of 50 x 9 mm are used and, you guessed right, Simport offers these.

A colleague of mine dealt with Rodac-style contact Petri dishes in a previous article, so I’ll refer you to it if you’re interested. Read about it here. We also offer a very airtight version of the box of 50 x 9 mm. This one is designed to minimize evaporation when one grows bacteria on 47 mm diameter filters on a solid medium sometimes but most of the time liquid media. Since these incubations must last 48 hours at a minimum, we want to ensure that nutrients are left to grow these harmful bacteria for detection.

In conclusion, I’d like to introduce the 100 x 15 mm petri dish. Simport does offer one, but it is square, not round. In simple terms of space usage, I’m sorry Dr. Petri, but this configuration is infinitely more efficient! However, it is commonly used in research laboratories where, thanks to the grid, it is used as a tool for bacteriophage-type virus typing.

So as you can see, even though we don’t offer the routine unit, Simport has much to offer as Petri dishes! See all of them here.